


Wanderers in the Fourth Dimension, or: Drunken Failsex

by Culumacilinte



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood, Withnail & I (1986)
Genre: 1960s, Crossover, Crossover Pairing, Drugs, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-14
Updated: 2010-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-15 02:54:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/156300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Culumacilinte/pseuds/Culumacilinte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto Jones meets two Doctors in a bar... Well, not quite, but it’s a near equivalent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wanderers in the Fourth Dimension, or: Drunken Failsex

**Author's Note:**

> It’s worth noting that yes, this Ianto is taken not directly from canon, but from a universe in which he is acquainted with several Doctors, including the Eighth Doctor and the Scream of the Shalka!Doctor, portrayed respectively by Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant. Hence, ye-olde-same-actor-mistaken-identity-hijinks.

‘Both of you here together?   And the universe hasn’t imploded yet?’

The two of them had been in the pub for a good hour now, so it was possible that this bizarre greeting was the result of too much alcohol mixed with Danny’s latest. Looking from Withnail to the bloke addressing them, though, Marwood came to the unsettling conclusion that it wasn’t a hallucination at all, and that someone had actually come up to initiate conversation with them. People tended not to address him and Withnail at all in pubs (or tea shops, or in streets, or... anywhere, really) unless they’d a bone to pick, and by necessity, he’d grown a bit jumpy. Paddies, usually, wankers and massive fuckers with too many pints in them, with florid faces and terrifyingly huge hands. This guy, though- he was young, or he looked it, anyway, even if he was wearing one of the sharpest, blackest, pinstripiest suits Marwood had ever seen outside a shop window, he had his short hair neatly gelled, and he smelled of something musky and spicy and probably dead expensive.

‘Um,’ said Marwood.

Withnail, being Withnail, had no such trouble with his words, and after a moment of lip-curling regard, he drawled, ‘Who the _fuck_ are you?’

The bloke in the suit looked surprised for the barest of moments, before schooling his face into something bland and unprepossessing.  ‘You’re- sorry, I mistook you for someone else.’

‘Name like that, I’d hate to think who must’ve spawned you,’ Withnail sniggered, and Marwood cursed silently into his whiskey.  The guy didn’t exactly look the sort to want to take Withnail outside to scrape him over the wall, but maybe he had friends, and honestly, did Withnail have to do this with everyone they met?  Little wonder they didn’t have any friends other than Danny.

But, surprisingly, the man hardly looked anything more than mildly put off.  ‘Jones,’ he supplied smoothly, and a little apologetically.  ‘Ianto Jones.’

That seemed to satisfy Withnail, who signalled the barman for another double gin like he was his personal valet, and Marwood was left torn between the desire to do the same and the stupid, stupid need to be polite about it and make conversation with the man. His internal monologue sounded like a braless lesbian on the subject of women’s rights, blustering about the oppressiveness of cultural norms, but it did fuck all to stop him offering a weakly conciliatory smile and saying, ‘Sorry about him. He gets a bit...’ But it seemed a bit much to attempt to sum up Withnail in a convenient word or two, and he sighed. ‘I’m Marwood. Peter Marwood. And _he’s_ Withnail.’




Hours pass differently in pubs.  Time was measured not by the clock hands but by glasses, and the burn of liquor- the longer you were there, the less it burnt; by the time you were completely numb, maybe you’d been there a few hours.  Three or four, maybe five.  By that point, time had a tendency to get a little syrupy anyway, so the specifics didn’t matter, only that you were insensible enough that you had to be shoved out the door by some long-suffering barman.

Time was definitely feeling a little syrupy right now.

He wasn’t sure how a simple introduction and a conciliatory drink for Withnail’s rudeness had turned into this, but three or four, or maybe five hours later, pinstriped Ianto Jones was still with them.  He had the weirdest money either of them had ever seen, but the barman took it, and that was all that mattered, and at some point during proceedings, Withnail had decided that he liked him after all, and had bullied Marwood into giving him one of the pills that resided in his pocket.  Marwood had taken one as well, and after that, he’d found himself smiling at the pair of them- and at the world in general- with much more sincerity.

‘It’s the Rift,’ Ianto was saying, his brow furrowed in an attitude of deep thought.  ‘How else could I have ended up in 1960- what year is this?’

’68,’ Marwood supplied dubiously.

’68, right.  At first I thought it was your fault- but you’re not you, so it can’t be.  The Doctor, that is.  Obviously you’re you, you’re just not the right you.’

Withnail had been regarding him with lazy, superior amusement as he talked, and now he snorted into his pint.  ‘You are a complete tosser aren’t you, Ianto Jones?’

Ianto met his eyes and held them, and the stool beneath Marwood squeaked a little when he shifted on it as Ianto smirked and said ‘Oh, you wish.’

It was dark by the time they started to make their way home.  Ianto was with them, because hell, why not?  He was a laugh, and much better to lean on than Withnail ever had been, Marwood found, especially as the pavement under his feet was feeling unaccountably clingy, and his funny little laugh had turned into a stupid, fucked-out giggle, and that itself was just hilarious anyway.

The trip up the stairs to the landing was a struggle, he and Ianto dangling Withnail’s insensate corpse between them, and Marwood was sure that his pockets hadn’t been this deep when he’d put his keys into them.  A script, a plastic baggie of something undoubtedly illegal, fags, crumbs, something unpleasantly moist, and then-- the heavy weight of a body slumped against him and sloppy, slimy heat against his neck.  Withnail had decided to return to the land of the living, apparently, and was celebrating by gnawing enthusiastically on Marwood’s throat.

Ianto was being no use at all, standing back somewhere in the shadows, and aggrieved, Marwood thought he could just make out a smile on his face.  He growled, shoving at Withnail.  ‘Fuck off, you souse, I’m trying to-’ The gnawing had become accompanied by a thoroughly disturbing sort of mumbling; clearly he was trying to say something, and Marwood was sure he didn’t want to know what.

The key was there, no doubt about it, but there was no way his clumsy fingers were ever going to find it with that bag of bones draped all over him, and feeling vindictive, Marwood put his elbow into the effort of removing him from his person.  ‘Go-’ a grunt of effort- ‘go chew on somebody else for a change; I’m sure 2001: A Space Odyssey over there would love it.’

‘2008, actually,’ Ianto interjected, but no-one was listening to him 

Withnail’s head lolled back on his neck, and with a final shove, he swayed away, his mouth open and eyes goggling, to stumble back into Ianto, who tried to catch him but didn’t really succeed.  As Marwood continued the quest for his key, there were several muffled thuds behind him, and when he finally, triumphantly fished it out, he turned to the sight of a heap of limbs slumped against the peeling wall, their owners with their tongues down each other’s throats.

He’d seen Withnail kiss women on a few occasions, but never anything like this, with his hands like pale spiders pawing ineffectually at Ianto’s posh suit.  Marwood got the vague impression of hands on the side of Withnail’s face, and the wet smacking of clumsy lips and tongues against tongues, and his stomach tightened in something that could equally be queasiness or arousal.

The key slotted into the lock with the satisfying scrape of metal against metal, and the handle turned with a click.  They showed no signs of desisting.  When he cleared his throat, one long hand extricated itself to flip him the bird; Marwood let his head fall against the wall with a dull _thump_.  ‘Fine, fine,’ he muttered, feeling the beginnings of a headache creeping up on him.  ‘Get yourselves arrested if you want to,’ he raised his voice irritably.  ‘I’m going to bed.’

One of the horrors of living with someone, so Marwood had heard from numerous sources before he’d moved in with Withnail, was having to listen to them having sex next door (or upstairs, or down the hall, depending on one’s living situation).  Blessedly- one of the few blessings that came with being Vivian Withnail’s flatmate- Marwood himself had never had to deal with that particular trial.  For, he thought, obvious reasons.  He’d known Withnail for five years, and at no point in that time had he ever known him to have a girlfriend.  As for himself, Marwood’s last girlfriend had long since blanched at the sight of the squalor he lived in and left him to it.  So sex simply had never been an issue.

Now, though- now, Marwood was trying with a superhuman strength of will to ignore the noises issuing from Withnail’s room.  It was a sort of torture he’d never before imagined.  Lying there with the world spinning slow and sick around him, with _noises_ emanating from Withnail’s room like some kind of bad porno.  _Squelches_ , and a horribly wet, rhythmic slapping, the tortured creaks of an antique bedframe which might never recover.  Marwood had relocated from his room (situated directly next to Withnail’s, the walls were far too thin to countenance that) to the sitting room some time ago, but it hadn’t helped.

The fuckers were _loud_ , too.  Grunting and groaning and moaning, and Ianto kept _giggling_ , and all of it interspersed regularly with exclamations of ‘Ouch!’ or ‘Bloody-‘, and no-matter how far into the couch he shoved his head, Marwood couldn’t shut out the noise.  It was like the tenth circle of Hell, if there had been a tenth circle.  Reserved for perverts and voyeurs and Peeping Toms, forced to listen for all eternity to the worst sex imaginable.  He wondered what he’d done to deserve this.

At one point, to his utter horror, he thought he could hear his own name, and something in his inner ear twisted nauseously.

‘Ianto,’ came the breathy correction, and Withnail made a noise that Marwood imagined was probably close cousin to the way a wounded walrus sounded.

‘I don’t give any kind of fuck what your name is, just get on with what- aaanghmmph.’

Given the lack of any further dialogue, Marwood could only suppose that Ianto had applied himself to the task with alacrity.  Trying not to think on that in any more detail than he absolutely had to, he clutched his pillow harder over his head, his conscious mind clawing desperately- and clumsily- at the door of blessed oblivion.

He woke some indeterminate time later to a fogged brain, fuzzy tongue, and the sound of vomiting.  His attention went to the vomiting first.  That in itself was not an unusual noise to hear in their residence by any means, but it was in a slightly different key than usual, which meant it wasn’t Withnail.

The other bloke, then.  Pinstripes.  Ianto Jones.  Marwood spared a brief thought to wonder whether it was possible to vomit in a Welsh accent before turning blinking and bleared eyes to the windows.  The light that inveigled its way through the gaps where the curtains were askew was the colour of an old coffee filter, and it stained the room with unpleasant staleness.  Still too fucking bright, though, even for that, and he squinted against the blinder of a headache that was looming ominously just out of conscious feeling.  His mouth felt like the Sahara, to boot, and he shut his eyes tight, willing his saliva glands into action.

This activity had approached states of near Zen concentration when Ianto stumbled out of the loo with a ‘fuck’ of such misery as to be nearly sepulchral, and with some effort, he peeled his gummed eyelids open.

The man looked like death- which is to say, he looked very much like Marwood felt.  Pale as wet cement, bearing a few choice bruises, and wearing only a blanket, he offered a weak, sickly smile.

‘Your toilet was full of newspaper, but I didn’t know where else-‘

‘Don’t care,’ Marwood interrupted him roughly.  The sensation of speaking and the noise which resulted felt uncomfortably like trying to overstuff his own head.

Obligingly, Ianto fell silent, hitching the ratty blanket up a little further round himself.  One side kept folding down, revealing one of his nipples: small and pink and inoffensive, as far as these things went.  Marwood found his eyes fixated on it, and he wondered if a nipple ought to produce such a feeling of vague, distant horror.  Perhaps it was the thought of Withnail’s mouth on it.

Ianto coughed, and Marwood’s gaze snapped instantly up to his face.  ‘Er.’  He glanced pointedly in the direction of Withnail’s room and back again.  ‘Did we really...?’

‘ _Loudly_ ,’ said Marwood with feeling, and Ianto blanched and ducked back into the bathroom to be violently sick.

His own stomach churned in sympathy at the sounds of Ianto retching, and Marwood grimaced.  _I’m not the one who slept with that Frankenstein’s monster last night_ , he reminded it sharply _.  You’ve got no reason to be trying to climb up my throat_.  His stomach, however, refused to listen to reason, and he scrambled up to heave sharply out the window, muscles contracting in sick rolls once, twice, before he staggered back to the couch to bury his face in the pillows again and forget about the world- and, by necessity, Withnail and his Welsh fucktoy.

He didn’t realise he’d lost consciousness until he regained it again with a start, jerking up to see Ianto standing by the door, back in his suit, looking like he didn’t quite want it to actually touch his skin until he had a chance to wash.  Or sterilise himself in a chemical bath.  He still looked sick as a pike, with purple circles under his eyes, but he scrubbed up better in a hurry than Marwood himself did.  Propping himself up, he scrubbed a hand across his mouth, where he could feel saliva drying in a track down his chin.

‘Wha-?’

‘Cardiff.’  Ianto adjusted his tie determinedly.   ‘I’m leaving for Cardiff, and finding Jack, and finding a way back home.’  _And anyone who gets in my way_... Marwood’s mind tacked onto the end, and he nodded, not quite sure what he ought to say to this.  Tie apparently fixed to his satisfaction, he turned away from the mirror, clearing his throat.  ‘Thank you two gentlemen for... your hospitality.

The sound of the door clicking shut was muffled by the detritus piled high around the sitting room, and Marwood sat for a moment, frowning vaguely.  Not at anything in particular, just off into the middle distance, like any good little acting student.  When nothing of interest presented itself there, he got up, shivering, to go track down some coffee and paracetamol.

Withnail emerged some hours later to call him a faggot and to say that he was off to go fire his agent, and that was that.


End file.
